subplotkudzu | Thinking Ahead

Entry tags:

campaign prospectus

Thinking Ahead

I know I still owe myself a GURPS character, but prep work for yesterday's Hufflepuff & Ravenclaw gave plus some crises at work took up too much time. I have noodled around with it, making some attempt to merge the Techo and Kinetic templates from GURPS Supers under the "where No Man Has Gone Before" lens, but GURPS is always so damn intimidating because of the breadth of unique options making me afraid I'll miss something vital.

This post isn't about that, however. I just want to share a campaign concept for my next prospectus, which is still some long time away (I already know that after I finish the current six month stint it's back to Emirikol and, quite probably, Old Lives, Old Civilizations). But after reading the disappointing Two O'Clock Eastern Wartime I wanted to steal the setting, but no aspect of the story:

Gone To Soldiers, Every One: It's a hard time for WBG, the coastal Maine radio station, but in 1942 it's a hard time for everyone. All the men of combat age have joined the army and the station is struggling to get by with a staff of older men, teens and women. It's a hardship that is crushing some but letting others blossom, and the station owner is audaciously trying to expand its offerings to keep creditors at bay. News has to be broken, radio dramas written and performed, and the airtime filled. Lurking in the background are spies and saboteurs, gangsters and gunmen, and the every present threats of a country at war.

I love the idea on a conceptual level, but I'm not sure I have enough to really fill a 6 -9 episode arc. Part of it is that it's just not a story that is usually told in an RPG. I have a strong suspicion that it will take no more than a session or so for it to turn into a nazi-agent hunting expedition with little to no radio content, just because that's a more standard adventure/mystery format.

Has anyone had real luck with smaller, more personal stories of business and personal growth as the core of a campaign rather than the frosting on an adventure/mystery cake? And if not, why is it that such stories work so well for other serial fiction but are tackled so seldom in this one?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think that there is real need for such lower-level or personal adventure stories in RPGs, where the bad guys aren't in the same league as a mad-man with a word-shaking threat.

I'm thinking of the villains in the old Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew or Rick Brant stories, where the bad guys are small fry industrial spies or gem smugglers or counterfeiters. Stories where you don't need someone of the caliber of Doc Savage or The Shadow to thwart, but still need to be dealt with with someone who can use their brains better than bullets.

In the movies you have A-list and then B-movies, films without the biggest budgets for scripts or actors or writers. Maybe there's room for B-adventures, where Joe Anybody can be the hero? This was one of the charms of Call of Cthulhu where even mundane scientists or cops or librarians, none with a lot of fancy combat skills or gadgets, could be the heroes.

As for your 'Radio Station at War" idea (I have the Dunning book but I haven't read it; why does it suck?) you may want to throw in such fun as the other players have to come up with some of the radio scripts by improving furiously (making it a game inside a game).

In the hokey but fun modern B-movie "The Radioland Murders" there's death afoot in another 1940's radio station on opening broadcast night you may want to check out for possible ideas. "Lady of Burlesque", while not set in a radio show but a Burlesque show, had a similar theme of death haunting a public venue where performances were going on, and some of the performers had to turn amateur detective to save their own necks.

I've also included some ideas you may find worth borrowing from my "Radio Heroes" pulp campaign write-up, listed at the bottom of my Pulp Avengers essay (http://www.fantasylibrary.com/lounge/pulpavengers.htm).

FREX, one idea from the above "Radio Heroes" campaign skeleton that I've always wanted to use was a radio show airing a blood and thunder radio serial pretending to be real. Unfortunately some folks in the listening audience in real trouble converge on the studio headquarters of the radio show begging for help from the very surprised persons airing the show. Naive villains thinking that the fictious radio hero(es) are also real and a possible threat to their plans would make preemptive strikes against the show, and as a result drag the PC heroes into bizarre plots that they would otherwise remain happily ignorant of.

::B::

Another Rick Brant fan! Cool!

I started a campaign in that universe years ago, Spindrift Revisited, about teenage children of world-famous scientists at Spindrift a generation later. Two of the PCs were the children of Rick and of Tony Briotti; the other two were the daughter of a Taiwanese immigrant and a boy from rural Texas who was a lightning calculator. We had two episodes about remote geosensing in Texas oilfields and two about rhino poachers in Africa, and then two of the four players moved out of town and the campaign died, to my regret.

I've been a fan of the Rick Brant stories for ages, and I'm only missing a few in the series (The Flaming Mountain, The Flying Stingaree, The Veiled Raiders, Danger Below, and The Magic Talisman). I've always through this would be a great inspiration for a RPG.

Your idea above sounds interesting, but doesn't Rick get friendly with Janice 'Jan' Miller? And isn't Tony Briotti a *male* archeologist?

http://www.rickbrant.com/

If you like the Rick Brant stories, I really encourage you to track down another great 'lost' juvenile series, the Ken Holt books.

::B::

Your idea above sounds interesting, but doesn't Rick get friendly with Janice 'Jan' Miller? And isn't Tony Briotti a *male* archeologist?

Geologist/archaeologist. And yes, of course. One of the PCs was the daughter of Rick and Jan Brant (née Miller); another was the son of Tony Briotti.

Oh, and I meant to add that in the continuation that I had worked out, Rick's sister Barby had married Chahda rather than Scotty. Scotty had ended up signing up with JANIG and was now an international man of mystery; I meant to introduce him in some later storyline.

This sounds like a lot of fun. Did you look at the Jonny Quest TV series for further inspiration?

::B::

Hadn't seen any significant amount of it, and back then I didn't own a VCR. I've read the comic book series, but I think that may have come later.

We had a nice distribution of PC types. Rick's daughter had psychic abilities focused on animal empathy. Tony's son was a bookish sort with encyclopedic knowledge. The Texas farmboy was a lightning calculator. And the half-Chinese girl, Gwendolyn Theodora Bao, had her pilot's license and was unusually strong and athletic. So they covered most of the bases for a not wholly realistic present-day campaign. All they needed was a dog. . . .

I have the Dunning book but I haven't read it; why does it suck?

Primarily because the very interesting and evocative radio station story is continually interrupted by a boring Ball of Twine mystery, with the peopple investigating it making a bunch of truly stupid life decisions. In addition, it's not even an engaging ball of twine because the characters move immediately from a revelation to the next clue, giving the reader no time to digest it, and each clue doesn't provide enough information to accurately determine where things are going next, or where one might even look for the next clue until a revelation drops into your lap. Not the sort of mystery I enjoy.

This is quite unfortunate as Dunning's other mysteries have been very enjoyable in the past. Have you read any to compare if this is atypical or not?

::B::

On to the RPG aspects, there are some good ideas here, but I'm noticing how the traiditiona gaming modes are reconfiguring the idea: I'm not overly thrilled with my inclusion of the spies aspect of the prospectus entry, but it's included because of my belief that the PCs would need somethign to investigate or fight, those being the classic RPG modes. Exploration, self exploration and building something are almost always secondary.

This is not to say that the Radio Heroes campaign skeleton doesn't have legs, but in many ways the PCs become a Private Detective agency with a twist, a radio equivalent of Jessica Fletcher. There's nothing wrong with this per se - and I agree that we could also use more games with Average Joes as the heroes - but it's not quite what I had in mind. Surely there's room in RPGs for the sort of personal triumph of a woman becoming a master radio-play writer or a borderline retired station mananger trying to go from penury to fame in his last shot at the brass ring. We just don't often do that.

I definitely had that as the dominant theme of my recent campaign Manse. It wasn't quite the dominant theme of Oak and Ash and Thorn, but it was at least one side of the dominant theme; when I plunged five British teenagers into Faerie, I envisioned Faerie as a real of wild passions with little balance, much like adolescence, and the personal changes the five characters went through were as much the core of the story as the external events that catalyzed them.

For a different non-adventure/mystery campaign, my First Contact focused on diplomatic negotiations with a technologically advanced alien race that showed up in the solar system in the 1930s.

I've got campaign logs for all three of them; drop an e-mail if you'd like to read them.

Those are all good examples, and I'm not surprised that you've threaded this needle before. But they all diverge somewhat because of the magical or SF nature of the setting - not a great divergence as they are all clearly exploration and self exploration games, but I find it much easier to get the players to sign on to a setting that, in addition to personal exploration, they also get access to kewl powerz, or at the very least are facing things outside of the real world.

I distintly recall the example campaign in Simply Roleplaying being a MASH homage. With a movie and 11 years of TV show under its belt there's obviously room in the setting for stories, but I can't see a gaming group signing on to play "doctors in wartime": there's no one to fight, nothing to investigate. It's just not part of the gaming standard.

In contrast, I keep noodling around with Caduceus Station but that's doctors in SF, which is made cooler by the presence of science fiction elements. And I know I could have re-structured Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw to being 6 sessions equallying 1 year (which several of the players preferred) and presented little to no mystery so they could explore a magical yet familiar setting. It would still have been much closer to what I'm talking about, but not quite what I'd like to see in Gone to Soldiers, Every One.

The lack of FX abilities (to borrow a label from Alternity) definitely makes a campaign harder to sell. Looking over my list of campaigns, I see only two that didn't have either FX abilities or a fantastic setting: Spindrift Revisited and Salle d'Armes. The first is "teenage children of world-famous scientists travel the world and have adventures," and the second is "fencing students get into trouble in 18th century Paris"—both clearly adventure-oriented. I've offered my players a soap opera campaign about power struggles within a midsized publishing firm, but they didn't bite. So I don't know how to sell such a campaign, and I don't have experience with running one.

On the other hand, some of my other campaigns have had large "day in the life elements." My Transhuman Space campaign had Aki's brilliant cooking skills, her shopping for masks for her collection, her work as a painter, and her teaching karate to Gianni's daughter Constanza; Blake's going through memetic therapy for her sociopathic tendencies; Gianni's parenting challenges and his discovery that his little sister was in love with another woman; and Louis's secret career as a jazz saxophonist. We once took a month off from investigating mysteries to look at personal life stuff and ended up spending four or five sessions on it, including one hilarious session where a guest player took the role of an interpersonal relations consultant called in to help the firm work through its personnel conflicts. (That might even work in the 1940s; businesses then had personnel departments, efficiency experts, and psychological evaluation and counseling.) The fact that the players were lured in by fantastic content didn't mean they weren't willing to spend hours and hours on nonfantastic personal stuff.

In Salle d'Armes, I just ran a session where the fencing master told all his students that if they were going to carry swords, like gentlemen, they also had to learn the manners of gentlemen, who knew how not to get into duels unnecessarily, and that the best way to learn this was to attend salons. Two of the PCs, the kept boy and the swashbuckling lesbian, found their way into a salon; the boy got into a very friendly conversation with a young lady who turned out to be the sister of a rival academy's fencing master, and then gave her offense by revealing that he was attracted to her, while the lesbian misunderstood what one of the gentlemen present had said and challenged him to a duel—and things only got worse after that! We still have to play out the visits of the Scots sergeant and the bourgeois law student.

Incidentally, if you decide to pursue this, I suggest taking a glance at Marge Piercy's novel, Gone to Soldiers. Despite the title, it gives a fair bit of attention to civilian life; years ago I came up with the slightly inaccurate tagline "World War II as seen by twelve Jews and a lesbian." It may give you a helpful fictional model.

A couple of thought responses, bulleted because I haven't time to work them into something more coherent.

- AFAIK, you are the only gamer I have met who thinks of RPGs as "serial fiction."

- Role-playing how someone gets through a day at their ordinary job means knowing a lot more about the setting and the character than role-playing a fight (usually) does. That means a lot of work on the part of a player, unlike reading something similar, where the author has kindly done it all for us.

- I suspect that most of us just don't get off on such cerebral pleasures as observing the inner growth of a character we're rping. (Or don't think we would, at any rate, as I am sure relatively few even try.) Most of us would rather waste bad guys and save the world; while such entertainment may be relatively gross, the rewards are at least familiar.

OK, maybe that's a bit cynical....

Bec

AFAIK, you are the only gamer I have met who thinks of RPGs as "serial fiction."

Just because I'm lonely doesn't mean I'm wrong.

I suspect that most of us just don't get off on such cerebral pleasures as observing the inner growth of a character we're rping. (Or don't think we would, at any rate, as I am sure relatively few even try.) Most of us would rather waste bad guys and save the world; while such entertainment may be relatively gross, the rewards are at least familiar.

I just find it bothersome that so few groups are willing to try. I know that it requires more investment of energy, but I think I can get you to agree that if that investment is made it produces strong results: I still think the Compass Rose solo session for Needle was one of the strongest games I've ever run and that was all about Needle's inner growth.

I remember it fondly, but I suspect it was only possible because as a group we had invested so much in the campaign as a whole, and I had invested a downright neurotic amount of emotional energy in the character. And it *was* a solo session, without the whole group making jokes, having side conversations, or even just being there for me to feel self-conscious in front of.

It's not a question of right and wrong, it's a question of mental framework. The way you approach gaming is quite writerly, I think, which is why you find it almost impossible to *not* plot. :) I'm not sure how common this is.

Bec

'Writerly'; what an interesting word!

::B::

That sort of thing happens to my campaigns pretty routinely. In my last cycle, the Transhuman Space campaign spent many hours on personal lives of the characters, in between cases for their detective firm, and so did the high fantasy campaign (of course, it was intended as high fantasy soap opera, and its four players were all people who've written fiction). Even the Buffyverse campaign had a strong element of serial drama, largely focused on the characters' love lives.

On the other hand, I would say that I never plot. I come up with situations that will put the PCs under strain. Then I see what they do. The plot emerges from the players' choices.

The thing is, while my players are partly selected and partly self-selected, I've gone through a whole lot over the past couple of dozen campaigns—around three dozen—and almost all of them have done just fine with the character-driven, roleplaying-intensive, serial drama format. And this is without having solo sessions. I just take it for granted that everyone will get up and play the part. It does help that three of my current players took theater courses in college, and several others used to belong to a band; but the rest of us have learned not to be self-conscious, even with material that a lot of players seem to flinch from, such as explicit sexual content. In fact, when I ran a Middle-Earth campaign, I found it necessary to announce very early that we would play by Tolkienian decorum, with a fade to black from the first kiss to the birth of the first child.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thinking Ahead

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject